How Conservatives Use Decontextualized Shards Of Truth To Tell HUGE Lies
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Elizabeth Warren “sticks by her story,” USA Today said. She “stands by account,” NBC News explained and “defends” it, according to The Wall Street Journal. CBS News put it this way: Warren “insists she was fired from a teaching job nearly 50 years ago because she was pregnant. A series of reports have questioned the story she’s been telling on the campaign trail.”
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These descriptions all create an impression that Warren’s story is at least questionable and perhaps misleading. But the evidence suggests otherwise. From my reading of the stories, she has been telling the truth all along.
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This mini-controversy has instead ended up highlighting problems not with Warren but with media coverage and political discourse. I see at least three:
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Balance over accuracy. It is certainly true, as CBS noted, that some people have questioned Warren’s account. A story in the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, did so, as did a writer for Jacobin, a socialist publication. But to say that stories have raised questions is not the same thing as saying the questions are good ones.
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Over the years, people have also “raised questions” about whether the earth rotates around the sun, the moon landing happened, Communism was fatally flawed, Elvis died and Barack Obama is an American. But I wouldn’t recommend putting any of those questions in a headline.
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A good rule: Whenever you see the phrase “raises questions” in a story, you should be deeply skeptical of its assertions. The phrase is a crutch that journalists too often use to make implicit accusations they can’t support.
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A false notion of inconsistency. One piece of supposed evidence of Warren’s prevaricating was that she hadn’t always publicly blamed pregnancy discrimination for her job loss. That’s true — and largely meaningless. Human beings don’t include every detail of a story each time they tell it, especially when the story involves difficult personal history.
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In this case, the evidence is on Warren’s side. The same CBS News report that included such a misleading summary also featured some good reporting: “The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant,” Trudy Randall, who taught at the same school, remembered. “Now, if you didn’t tell anybody you were pregnant, and they didn’t know, you could fudge it and try to stay on a little bit longer. But they kind of wanted you out if you were pregnant.”
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Sexism. Discrimination — against women, racial minorities and others — often happens in unannounced ways. That doesn’t make every claim of discrimination true, of course. But it does mean that employers who discriminate don’t typically broadcast what they’re doing.
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The bias against pregnant women (and mothers) may be the classic version of this. Employers find excuses to avoid hiring a young, recently married woman who’s otherwise an excellent job candidate. Or co-workers express disappointment about a female colleague getting pregnant.
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In 1971, when the Warren episode happened, sexism was a bigger problem than it is today. Pregnancy discrimination was still legal, in fact. Yet the last few days of cluck-clucking show some of the ways that sexism is still with us today.
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In the end, Elizabeth Warren isn’t the person who should be reflecting on how she’s handled this story.
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For more … |
“You don’t have to like Warren or agree with her policies to acknowledge the reality of pregnancy discrimination,” National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis wrote. “Too many conservatives don’t want to talk about it because it’s somehow a ‘liberal’ thing, but a more pro-woman, pro-family right would be willing to admit it happens.”
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“Throughout the American workplace, pregnancy discrimination remains widespread. It can start as soon as a woman is showing, and it often lasts through her early years as a mother,” Natalie Kitroeff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg wrote in The Times earlier this year. “Whether women work at Walmart or on Wall Street, getting pregnant is often the moment they are knocked off the professional ladder.”
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Whether or not the original Free Beacon story was fair, a “poisoned version” quickly spread among pro-Trump figures, The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan argued. “If there is a scandal here, it’s how — in the bad-faith media world — narrowly presented facts without sufficient context can do unfair harm. They can and will be weaponized, falsely regurgitated and twisted beyond recognition.”
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“The scrutiny on Warren’s pregnancy-discrimination story feels like an omen of even more blatantly gendered attacks to come,” Bridget Read wrote in The Cut.
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